Issue 19 - Winter 2011

Antennae
ISSN 1756-9575

Animal Wrongs and Rights

Steve Baker What Are the Relevant Questions? / Peter Singer Beyond Animal Liberation / John Simons Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation / Roger Scruton Animal Rights and Wrongs / Tom and Nancy Regan The Case for Animal Rights / Zoe Peled Discussing Animal Rights and the Arts / Yvette Watt Artists, Animals and Ethics / Mysoon Rizk Jonathan Horowitzs Reclamation of a Meat Plant / Noah Cincinnati The Visibility of Violence / Camilla Calamandrei The Tiger Next Door / 1 Sue Coe I Am an Animal Rights Activist Artist / Julien Salaud Lets be Simple for Starters

Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Editor in Chief
Giovanni Aloi

Academic Board
Steve Baker Ron Broglio Matthew Brower Eric Brown Carol Gigliotti Donna Haraway Linda Kalof Susan McHugh Rachel Poliquin Annie Potts Ken Rinaldo Jessica Ullrich

Advisory Board
Bergit Arends Rod Bennison Helen Bullard Claude dAnthenaise Petra Lange-Berndt Lisa Brown Rikke Hansen Chris Hunter Karen Knorr Rosemarie McGoldrick Susan Nance Andrea Roe David Rothenberg Nigel Rothfels Angela Singer Mark Wilson & Brynds Snaebjornsdottir

Global Contributors
Sonja Britz Tim Chamberlain Concepcin Cortes Lucy Davis Amy Fletcher Christine Marran Carolina Parra Zoe Peled Julien Salaud Paul Thomas Sabrina Tonutti Johanna Willenfelt

Copy Editor
Maia Wentrup

Front Cover Image: Sue Coe, Slaughterhouse Trenton, 2006 Sue Coe

EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 19

ne of the most defining aspects of Antennaes status as a multidisciplinary journal has simply been the determination to relentlessly present a variety of perspectives, always delivered by a diverse range of voices. Some have misinterpreted this ambition as a lack of concern for certain subjects in the human-animal discourse. However, as it was envisioned since its inception, Antennaes main purpose is not that of takings sides, nor that of telling readers what is right or wrong, in the assumption that that the work of the reader may indeed entail the tasks of deciphering and deciding. For this reason, more than in other previous issue, this present one is consistently shaped by the perspectives and voices of some of the most influential and challenging contemporary thinkers. Antennae is nearing its 5th birthday the first issue was released in March 2007. Back then it was impossible to imagine that in 2011, wed be able to gather exclusive interviews from the likes of Peter Singer, Tom and Nancy Regan, Roger Scruton and John Simons all in one issue dedicated to the subject of animal advocacy and the arts. And most importantly, it would have been even harder to imagine that these names would have been interviewed by some of the most exciting scholars who over the past twenty years have consistently shaped the field of human-animal studies itself: Carol Gigliotti, Garry Marvin and Rod Bennison, just to name a few, have all greatly contributed to the shaping of new perspectives through their discussions and questioning. Those familiar with the work of these scholars will instantly understand what this issue is about and what it will attempt to do. It is rather hard to identify a more controversial and divisive subject of debate in the field of human-animal studies than the one of animal advocacy; a subject that seems to acquire even more complexity when discussion is brought in the arena of the arts. I personally wanted Animal rights and wrongs to deliberately be dense with writing in opposition to the lavishly illustrated formula which has become Antennaes trademark. I wanted this issue to be about questions I wanted to ask and wanted this isseus contributors to ask even more than I could have. How far have we gone since the publishing of Peter Singers Animal Liberation from 1973, where are we finding ourselves and where are we going? But most importantly, who are we going there with? This issue attempts to answer these key questions and it does so by looking at a range of different media, geographical locations and contexts in the attempt of finding more questions. As per usual, I would like to take the opportunity to thank all those involved in the making of this issue for dedicating their time and care to this project. Ultimately, many thanks to Sue Coe for allowing us to publish a portfolio of old and never before seen images in this issue of Antennae.

Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae Project

CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 19
5 Steve Baker: What are the Relevant Questions?
Steve Baker, Emeritus Professor of Art History at UCLan, and author of the seminal books The Postmodern Animal and of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation introduces this issue of Antennae. Text by S teve Baker

9 Beyond Animal Liberation

In this exclusive interview with Antennae, Peter Singer discusses animal rights, speciesism, animals in contemporary art, and role played by the field of human-animal studies. Questions by G iovanni Aloi

16 Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation

In this exclusive interview with Antennae, John Simons discusses human-animal divides, the role played by anthropomorphism in our culture, and his experience as British man who moved to Australia. Questions by R od Bennison

21 Animal Rights and Wrongs

In this exclusive interview with Antennae, controversial philosopher Roger Scruton talks to Garry Marvin about the concepts of right and person, battery farms, pleasure, suffering and hunting. Questions by G arry Marvin

27 The Moral Status of Animals

Antennae presents Chapter #7 from Roger Scrutons Animal Rights and Wrongs.

42 The Case for Animal Rights

In this exclusive interview with Antennae, Tom and Nancy Regan discuss animal activism and cognitive ethology. Questions by C arol Gigliotti

50 Animal Rigths, Human Wrongs

What makes right acts right? What makes wrong acts wrong? Some moral philosophers believe that the best answers to these questions require the recognition of moral rights. This is the position I favor and the one I will try to defend in subsequent chapters. It will therefore be useful to say something about the nature and importance of rights, the better to frame the discussions of other positions that differ from mine. Text by T om Regan

53 Discussing Animal Rights and the Arts

Vancouver-born photographer and writer Zoe Peled chairs a discussion on animal rights and the arts between philosophers, academics, art critics and artists: Carol Gigliotti, Peter Singer, Robin Laurence, Noah Becker and Ashley Fruno. Questions and text by Z oe Peled

62 Artists, Animals and Ethics

In Art Crazy Nation (2001), Matthew Collings made the following observation: Brits are very fond of animals and children. Their exhibitions are now full of animals, usually mutants of some kind, or sexually aroused, or dead for example, sharks and pigs by Damian Hirst, which symbolise death and racehorses by Mark Wallinger, symbolising class, but with the front ends different from the back ends symbolising mutant breeding. Text by Y vette Watt

73 Jonathan Horowitzs Reclamation of a Meat Plant

Associate Professor of Art History Mysoon Rizk discusses the work of controversial artist Jonathan Horowitz. Text by M ysoon Rizk

82 The Visibility of Violence

Zoological parks are contradictory institutions. Such an understatement is almost taken for granted in our contemporary discourses concerning animal welfare, zoological display, and global biodiversity. These spaces have been designed to promote popular interest in zoological wonder and global wildlife protection, but do so at the expense of animal freedom and well-being. As a species, we human beings love zoos, but also struggle with their implications. Text by N oah Cincinnati

96 The Tiger Next Door

Camilla Calamandrei is a documentary filmmaker who specialises in small stories, which connect in different ways to a larger, complex American nervous system. She had been researching tiger-breeder/hoarder stories in the USA for some time before learning about Dennis Hill, who when we are first introduced to him in her film The Tiger Next Door, keeps 24 tigers, 3 bears, 6 leopards and 1 ageing cougar in makeshift cages in his backyard compound, near the tiny town of Flat Rock, Indiana. Text and questions by L ucy Davis

106 Sue Coe: I Am an Animal Rights Activist Artist

Sue Coe, one of the most committed activist artists in America, has during her thirty-five-year career charted an idiosyncratic course through an environment that is at best ambivalent toward art with overt socio-political content. In this issue of Antennae, the artist presents a new portfolio of images on the subject of animal welfare. Questions by G iovanni Aloi and Rod Bennison

120 Lets be Simple for Starters:

Reflections on Elisabeth de Fontenays Le Silence des Btes, la Philosophie lEpreuve de lAnimalit: For the Defence of Animals. Text and Images by J ulien Salaud

LETS BE SIMPLE [1], FOR STARTERS:

Reflections on Elisabeth de Fontenays Le Silence des Btes, la Philosophie lEpreuve de lAnimalit: For the Defence of Animals. Text and Images by Julien Salaud Text translated from French to English by B aden Pailthorpe

or those of you who are interested in the emergence of the figure of the animal in Occidental thought since the Second World War, you would have undoubtedly observed the trauma caused by the discovery of the Nazi death camps, since many of these figures, as Jews, were victims of Nazi persecution. And as those of you who have read Elias Canettis Le Territoire de lHomme, Jacques Derridas LAnimal que donc Je Suis, or Charles Pattersons Eternal Treblinka have no doubt understood, the bte philosophique that arose from the ashes of Auschwitz is intimately linked to our future, and that in this beasts wake there remains a veritable string of worrisome, unanswered ethical questions. It is to those who still have doubts about these arguments that I would like to introduce the work of Elisabeth de Fontenay, who is by now well known in France for her book: Le Silence des Btes, la Philosophie lpreuve de lAnimalit (1998). The relevance of de Fontenays work is twofold. Firstly, as an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and as a prolific essayist, her work is devoted to the rights of animals. Whats more, de Fontenay, a Jewish intellectual born in 1934, is President of both the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the Commission for Holocaust

Education. The compassion that she shows for humans and animals alike clearly explains her powerlessness to define any unique human characteristic.[2] According to her own admissions, this inability is a direct consequence of her being part of a culture that suffered the atrocious conditions of industrial slaughter at the hands of Adolph Hitlers hegemonic insanity.[3] The situation may arise one day when a witness, struck by a sickness of soul and mind that flows through their blood, finds a distance in the faltering of tragedy, a distance that allows them to welcome the inevitable fall of a human child, and to consider henceforth the shared fate given to those only held as living. It is upon this conviction that the philosophical basis of Le silence des btes was constructed; retracing the history of Occidental encounters with animals, from the Pre-Socratic dawn, to the era of cloning, to better understand to their implications for the ontology of animals and beasts. In the beginning was the era of Chronos, as recounted by Plato in The Statesman:[4] [t]here were demigods, who were the shepherds of the various species and herds of animals, and each one was in all respects sufficient for those whom he was the shepherd; neither was there any violence, or devouring of one another, or war or quarrel

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Elisabeth de Fontenay
Le Silence des Betes, 1999

among them [] for all men rose again from the earth, having no memory of the past. They had the pleasure to converse between human and animal, in order to discuss the philosophy [] of capabilities specific [to man] that are enriched by differencethe treasure of wisdom.[5] It is clear that this dialogue was broken during the cycle of Zeus, a period under which we continue to live today.[6] And rather than nurturing a common bond with the animal kingdom, each and every difference that Ancient Greek humanists established between themselves and their Zoological counterparts seem only to have galvanised the ontological rift that separates them. It is the inevitability of death that would drive certain animals to be savage, the concern for livestock in agriculture that would submit domestic animals to man, and the emergence of towns that would separate muted animals from talkative politicians.[7] In order to validate these ideas, philosophy has focused itself on sacrifices, from those of the Antiquity, to the Crucifixion of Christ. As Elisabeth de Fontenay reminds us, the

rituals in use at the beginning of Antiquity responded to the ethical concerns that arose from domesticated animals being put to death, since a wild animal could no longer be offered as a sacrifice any more than a domestic animal could be forced to hunt.[8] She then underlines that the sacrifice of cattle was itself motivated by the nutritional needs of the newly populated towns. The first expiatory sacrifices would allow the Ancient Greeks to reconcile the slaughter of working cattle and the consumption of their flesh with a mythological belief in the shared genealogy between man and animals. It is from within these rituals that philosophy considers that the animal would experience only the loss of that life. This is because these animals experienced a kind of golden age in Ancient Greece, playing a crucial role in the community as intermediaries between man and the Gods.[9] However, these bovine ceremonies would lead to a shift from the sacrificial to the communal. As a result of the use of taxidermist processes to display the sacrificed animals, the guilt of killing that was at first shared by the community of those who consumed meat would later fall upon the sacrificial knife itself. According to Cicero, this transfer of responsibility from the group to the object illustrates the extent to which the sacredness of animals had been undermined by the fringes of monotheism, because silent and instinctively-driven animals were unable to enter into any agreement whatsoever. As a result, he excluded them from humanists, since man and the Gods were assembled under one and the same need for justice. The Stoics would conclude that without injustice [men could then] use animals for their own interests.[10] It is here that we come to understand, through a persistent and expanding period of Ancient Greek humanism, that the animal would finally lose its position as a sacred intermediary. The dialogue that had been formed between the animal, man and the Gods was ruptured by the progressive decline of sacrificial practices after Yahweh, the unique God, expressed to his people both his indifference towards the slaughter of animals and his preference for prayer. Despite this eagerness, the animal would not be completely abandoned by man. Religious laws first implemented by the Hebrews, and subsequently by the Jews, continued to protect animals from the suffering associated with sacrifice a concern that also preoccupied the Ancient Greeks. It was Christianity that would finally rid man of any and all consideration for animals. But what would fate hold for the sacred dialogue? Let us first remember that since Jesus was the lamb of God, his Crucifixion implied a solemn shift from the

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Elisabeth de Fontenay by Julien Salaud

Elisabeth de Fontenay, 2011 Salaud

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animal towards man, between pagan sacrifices and that of Christ. Add to this the fact that God, having offered his flesh and blood through Christ, whom he embodied during both the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, let himself be impaled to pay for the debt of mankind.[11] It is here that we come to understand that the allegiance originally formed between animals, Gods and man was then substituted by the trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If we consider finally that the Crucifixion was and will continue to be a unique event, that would be repeated by the Eucharist celebration everywhere and everyday, until the end of time, we can conclude that the spiritualised Christian sacrifice was at once communal and expiatory. It is the eternal human suffering symbolised in Christ that brought man together in an infinite guilt, a guilt that also touched the animals with whom the Lamb of God previously allowed integration. The suffering of animals was no longer problematic since the new God authorised the consumption of all species. Having removed the brakes from the prickly and awkward issue of animal rights, humanism could then rally its troops on a remorseless trajectory of global destruction. And if the final chapter in this saga would be the death of God, then, despite his dismissal, today the inconsistency of our predatory relationship with the world continues those very paradigms that were solidified in the foundations of Christianity. I did not try to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence. [] We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men [] confine their neighbours [] What is constitutive is the action that divides [animality], and not the science elaborated once this division is made and calm restored [] Then, and then only, can we determine the realm in which [the animal] and the man of reason, moving apart, are not yet disjunct; and in an incipient and very crude language, antedating that of science, begin the dialogue of their breach, testifying in a fugitive way that they still speak to each other.[12] It is because of Elisabeth de Fontenays commitment to highlighting the continuous ruptures that transformed the talkative animal into inert meat

that she can declare with conviction that the ontological separation of man from animal can be traced to the Crucifixion of Jesus, and that the paradigmatic manipulations that led to this sacrifice engendered a long-term, methodological dismantling of animals by science. Underlying Elisabeth de Fontenays conviction is both her philosophy and her political engagement in the defense of animals. She singles out not only the suffering that we inflict upon animals, but through this, the means by which we may also relieve them of it. The suggestion is by no means easy: if we believe in philosophy, the rupture between man and animal is by no means fully accomplished since theyre still talking to each other. We may be then tempted to open the debate about animal rights in this common territory of dialogue, because otherwise, how legitimate would a common justice between man and animal be if the foundations were only debated by man? Yet if any kind of community flourishes in the fissures lack of progress, we must beware of misanthropy. In 1962, Claude Levi-Strauss shared what history had taught him: Never before than over the last four centuries has Occidental man been able to understand that by allowing himself to be radically separated from the animal world, by giving himself everything that he withdrew from the other, he created a vicious cycle, and that by this same constantly shifting border, divisions between men themselves would appear, and be used to claim in favour of increasingly restricted minorities the privilege of a corrupt humanism that was at once born to, and borrowed from, the principle of vanity.[13] Do we, then, understand that it is as dangerous as it is futile to shift these ontological borders? In order to be effective, we must abolish them. Lets be simple, for starters.[14] Then, lets commit ourselves to creating a language that shatters the silence of animals, whilst considering the following point: In sacred societies, only mystics and artists had received permission, or rather, had seized the right, to pray for animals.[15]

References
[1] TN. The double meaning in French for btes refers both to the animal and being silly, or simple; stupid. [2] DE FONTENAY Elisabeth, Le silence des btes, la philosophie lpreuve de lanimalit (SdB). Paris, Fayard, 1998, p. 13. [3] SdB, p. 16. [4] Platon, Le Politique, Paris : Les Belles Lettres, 1950 in SdB. pp. 65-75 [5] SdB, p.74

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[6] SdB. pp. 52-62. In Ovids Metamorphoses, animals were already silent. [7] SdB. p.74 [8] Ibid. pp. 217-25 [9] Ibid. pp. 217-25 [10] SdB. p. 106 [11] SdB p. 244 [12] FOUCAULT, Michel, Histoire de la folie lge classique. Folie et draison. Paris : Plon, 1961, in SdB. pp. 19-20. Elisabeth de Fontenay has here replaced the words madness (folie) and madman (fou) with animality (animalit) and animal (animal) respectively. [13] SdB. p.47. [14] TN. The double meaning in French for btes refers both to the animal and being silly, or simple; stupid. [15] SdB. p. 745. According to Elisabeth de Fontenay, masterpieces painted by Rembrandt [...], Chardin [...], Soutine or Bacon can repair our damaged eyes, in DE FONTENAY Elisabeth, Sans offenser le genre humain. Paris, Albin Michel, 2008, p. 193.

Elisabeth de Fontenay is a French philosopher born in 1934. She began questioning the connections between humans and animals through history with her second book: Diderot ou le Matrialisme Enchant (1981). Ever since, she explored the subject in greater depth in Le Silence des Btes, la Philosophie lpreuve de lAnimalit (1998) and Sans Offenser le Genre Humain. Rflexions sur la Cause Animale (2008). Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, Elisabeth de Fontenay is also President of both the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the Commission for Holocaust Education. Julien Salaud is a French artist born in 1977. He began studying the symbolic power of animals in visual arts, both theoretically and practically, at the University Paris 8, Saint Denis, where he gained a Master in Contemporary art and new media in 2009. He is currently working on a thesis to extend his researches to environmental, political and social issues. His artwork has been shown in the Muse de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris, 2009), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris 2010) or the Fondation dentreprise Ricard (Paris, 2011).

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Antennae.org.uk
Issue twenty will be 125 online on the 21st of March 2012